The character of the economic policy to be pursued should not be difficult of apprehension, if only these underlying peoples are conceived as an estate in tail within the dynastic line of descent. The Imperial establishment which so is prospectively to take over the surveillance of these modern peoples under this projected enterprise
in dominion, may all the more readily be conceived as handling its new and larger resources somewhat unreservedly as an estate to be administered with a shrewd eye to the main chance, since such has always been its relation to the peoples and territories whose usufruct it already enjoys. It is only that the circumstances of the case will admit a freer and more sagacious application of those principles of usufruct that lie at the root of the ancient Culture of the Fatherland.
This excessively long, and yet incomplete, review of the presumptive material advantages to accrue to the common man under a régime of peace by unconditional surrender to an alien dynasty, brings the argument apparently to the conclusion that such an eventuality might be fortunate rather than the reverse; or at least that it has its compensations, even if it is not something to be desired. Such should particularly appear to be the presumption in case one is at all inclined to make much of the cultural gains to be brought in under the new régime. And more particularly should a policy of non-resistant submission to the projected new order seem expedient in view of the exceedingly high, not to say prohibitive, cost of resistance, or even of materially retarding its fulfillment.
CHAPTER V
Peace and Neutrality
Considered simply on the face of the tangible material interests involved, the choice of the common man in these premises should seem very much of a foregone conclusion, if he could persuade himself to a sane and perspicuous consideration of these statistically apparent merits of the case alone. It is at least safely to be presumed that he has nothing to lose, in a material way, and there is reason to look for some slight gain in creature comforts and in security of life and limb, consequent upon the elimination, or at least the partial disestablishment, of pecuniary necessity as the sole bond and criterion of use and wont in economic concerns.
But man lives not by bread alone. In point of fact, and particularly as touches the springs of action among that common run that do not habitually formulate their aspirations and convictions in extended and grammatically defensible documentary form, and the drift of whose impulses therefore is not masked or deflected by the illusive consistencies of set speech,—as touches the common run, particularly, it will hold true with quite an unacknowledged generality that the material means of life are, after all, means only; and that when the question of what things are worth while is brought to the final test, it is not these means, nor the life conditioned on these means, that are seen to serve as the decisive criterion; but always